Julie Coultas
Associate Tutor (Life Sciences)

Research

Julie is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Psychology Department at the University of Sussex. Her main research interest is conformity from an evolutionary perspective.  Her current research interests include cooperative behaviour, conformity, evolutionary social psychology, emotional intelligence, sexual selection/female choice, kinship and the evolution of religion. Current research includes empirical tests of Boyd and Richerson's conformist transmission model, social influence and group size, and work on the emotions and adolescents.

Recent Research
Julie was a Research Fellow working in the IDEAs Lab which is part of the Human Centred Technology Group at the University of Sussex (2003 - 2006). She was principal investigator on a modified systematic review entitled 'How compelling is the evidence for the effectiveness of e-Learning in the post-16 sector?'. This research, the REVEEL project, was funded by the Eduserv foundation (March 2004- February 2006). 

Julie was a Research Fellow working with Harry Torrance on a Learning and Skills Research Centre/LASDA funded review on ' Do summative assessment and testing have a positive or negative effect on post-16 learners' motivation for learning in the Learning and Skills sector?' She was also a Research Fellow in the IDEAs (Interactive Digital Educational Applications) lab in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences. Her work in the IDEAs lab focused on an EPSRC funded project, Interactive Educational Television Content (IETC). She gave a talk at the EPSRC funded workshop in July 2002 on Emotional Intelligence and IETC.

Julie was a Research Fellow on a DfES project (2000 - 2002) with a role as both coordinator and evaluator for an Independent/State School Partnership (see: link one; link two; link three ). The partners on this project included two state schools, one independent school, the Local Education Authority, the University of Sussex, and an Education Action Zone. She was a Research Fellow on a DfID international project (MUSTER) from 1999 to 2000. She was the evaluator on the Centre for Talent Enhancement run by the University of Sussex Institute of Education (1998).

Central Research Interests in Brief 

*  Prosocial and antisocial behaviour in schools
* Emotional Intelligence linked to education 
* Cooperative behaviour
* Conformity and group size
* Imitation and social learning 
*  Gene-culture coevolutionary models

Research Interests

Julie's main research interest is conformity and social learning and the empirical work in her doctoral thesis 'When in Rome... Cooperative Conformity as Cultural Adaptation' focused on testing a theory of human cooperative behaviour. She ran experiments in which she tested whether the size of the group, the situation, and the proportion of a group producing a specific behaviour had an influence on whether others would copy that behaviour. This type of work has an impact on how we think about working in groups, peer influence, social norms, and social learning. As a psychologist who has worked in education her particular interest is in both research design and evaluation of emotional intelligence (EQ) interventions within schools.